The Three "Tenses" Of Argument: Past, Present & Future.

With Make Yourself Academy's entire focus being inspiring and supporting folks to become their ideal selves, we wanted to take a minute to write out a helpful framework to help make sense of conversation and argument.

Often, we've discovered that conversations can quickly turn into confusion or miscommunication, based on easy misunderstandings and the focus each party has in their engagement.

Time and the human experience, being the fickle thing it is, allows us to operate throughout all aspects of existence.

As such, it's helpful to remember that in dialogue, individuals are usually talking in one of three "Tenses": Either Past, Present, or Future.

Often, they oscillate between all three.

In the following article, we will briefly discuss the theme behind each tense, and what will help you in your quest for being understood and making sense of the positions of others.

Let's dive in.

When individuals focus on Past Tense, they're using focusing on determining fault or blame: Who was responsible for what.

Helpful in a variety of situations, focusing on the past in conversation and argument usually has the goal of assigning a reason, a motive, or understanding consequences of what happened, who-caused-what.

This past-tense argument style is forensic in nature, placing or assigning blame.

When focusing on the Present Tense, individuals are usually trying to determine the values each other hold, don't hold, or what they think is right/wrong.

Discussions around values, morals, tend to always focus on the present, trying to make sense of what we believe and what we think is right and wrong.

Helpful in many ways, this form of argument is demonstrative, identifying who's "in the club" and who doesn't belong, what the group believes or doesn't.

When folks talk in a future tense, they're generally discussing choices, or ethics.

Things like what an individual or society should do is often a future-state conversation. This type of conversational tool is deliberative in nature: helping determine decisions to be made for man and mankind.

Clearly, these tenses can be and are interwoven and don't exist in isolation.

Often, one must tap into the past to make sense of how we got here (partially a component of hard/soft determinism; an upcoming topic of heated discussion!), or taking inventory of our current state, to understand how to get to our future state.

In this way, none of these focuses are bad, or negative for conversation.

This post is just trying to provide key pieces of conversation and help you avoid missteps or confusion in your own goals in discussion and argument.

If you're trying to determine the best path forward for a future decision, for example, and your partner seems to keep redirecting on a past mistake or present circumstance, it could be helpful to acknowledge their concerns or observations, and figure out how to construct a future plan that DOESN'T lead to a similar result.

As with all things, it's important to remember to "be kind, for we all fight a hard battle". It's also helpful to never assume malice and instead just choose to believe that folks are being misunderstood, having a hard time communicating what they believe, etc.

Lastly, remember that, "all ambiguous data will usually be interpreted negatively".

This is the beautiful power of language and dialectical reasoning: To use words to come to an understanding, to be heard and understood; rather than using words to bully, manipulate, persuade, or mislead.

Good luck out there!